Turkey has belittled the EU in a week of macho posturing, but strategic relations go deeper than the rhetoric.

Albania and Macedonia should start accession talks, but human rights abuses mean Turkey should stay on hold, EU says in draft report seen by EUobserver.

A country that has only 20 percent of the population of Greece and virtually no military forces cannot reasonably be considered a security concern.

In an annual progress report, European Commission says "independence of justice, law enforcement as well as national anti-corruption authorities need substantial improvement".

While Bulgaria aims to have all 28 EU countries in Sofia in May to give a boost to EU accession of the Western Balkans, some EU countries want to make sure their reservations about Kosovo are noted.

Ahead of an EU summit in Sofia in May, two different viewpoints look at Kosovo's future accession to the EU - one from Pristina and one from Brussels.

Bulgaria's prime minister Boyko Borisov described a meeting at the Black Sea resort of Varna between the presidents of Turkey, the EU council, and the European commission as "charged with great tension." Disputes remain far from resolved.

As EU leaders Donald Tusk and Jean-Claude Juncker meet president Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Bulgaria, their reluctance to use their diminishing leverage with Ankara means his dismantling of Turkey's democracy only speeds up.

Bosnia-Herzegovina needs a memorial to the 100,000 dead in the 1992 war, if it is to move on.

The EU got "limited" effect for the €9bn it spent trying to modernise Turkey in recent years, auditors have said. Turkey has been "backsliding" on reforms since 2013 due to "lack of political will", the European Court of Auditors found.

The EU institutions - notably the European parliament - kick up a big fuss about jailed journalists in Turkey. But not all journalists are 'equal' in Brussels' eyes.

The EU-Ukraine association deal - probably the most explosive EU deal with a third country in history - was long on open markets and trade barriers, but quiet on welfare states, poverty and inequality: all of which feed populism.

Faced with poorer infrastructure, dual food standards and what can seem like hectoring from western Europe it is not surprising some central and eastern European member states are rebelling.

After the European Commission presented its Western Balkans strategy last week, with a view of possibly integrating the region by 2025, some EU ministers were less enthusiastic after their first discussion of the new policy.